Winter sports activities, for me, are an indoor matter: an unhealthy obsession with the N.B.A. and a lifelong mystification by, and indifference to, the slippery world of the N.H.L. Evidently, there are those that suppose extra broadly and really take part—outdoor, even. Maybe, after such a protracted quarantine, these lovers—the skiers, the climbers, and the remaining—have some extent.
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This week, we’re bringing you a variety of items on snowboarding, snowboarding, and different perilous winter pastimes. In “The Wild Carnival at the Heart of Skiing’s Most Dangerous Race,” Nick Paumgarten visits a small city within the Austrian Alps identified for its terribly formidable slopes. In “Learning to Ski in a Country of Beginners,” Peter Hessler travels throughout China to see how its athletes are on the brink of compete in subsequent yr’s Winter Olympics, in Beijing. In “Dude, Where’s the Snow?,” Sheila Yasmin Marikar reviews on the snowboarder Jeremy Jones and his marketing campaign to lift consciousness concerning the risks of local weather change. In “Kílian Jornet, Sky Runner,” Stephen Kurczy follows the champion ski mountaineer as he makes an attempt to beat heights that must defy conquering. Finally, in “The Adventure of a Skier,” Italo Calvino works his magic as he describes a bunch of younger boys who set out on a winter journey in northern Italy. “Air and snow were now the same color, opaque white, but by peering intently into that whiteness, so that it almost became less dense, the boys could make out the sky-blue shadow, suspended in the midst of it, flying this way and that as if on a violin string.” Enjoy. And put on a hat.
—David Remnick